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To: Chad Fairbanks
AS an American Indian who's people have lived here for over 10,000 years, I don't have any vested interest in proving whether anyone was here first, or second etc...

Neither do I. I'm a blend of American Indian and European but I don't try to hang on to either past -- I'm an American.

Who's to say (without full scientific study and evidence) which cultures developed here? Obstructing the study of Kennewick Man doesn't contribute to the evidence base. Nobody knows for sure at this point whether Kennewick was an Indian "ancestor," as you call him, or whether he was as distinct from Indians racially as a Cro Magnon was from a Neanderthal. If you frame the question broadly enough, all humans are linked through ancestry.

When Kennewick man was discovered half-buried on a bank of the Columbia River they thought at first he was the remains of a recent homicide. No one deliberately dug him up in violation of tradition. But it soon became clear the remains were worthy of careful anthropological study. Your claims in an earlier post that the scientists have studied him sufficiently simply isn't true. There's an enormous amount yet to be learned from the remains. The politicians moved in almost as soon as they learned of the discovery and did enormous damage both to the Kennewick bones and the discovery site. They grabbed the bones before any serious study had begun. The matter's been litigated ever since and some of the bones have gone missing already.

50 posted on 10/01/2004 10:47:36 PM PDT by Bernard Marx (I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.)
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To: Bernard Marx


Sure, there is plenty to be learned about Kennewick Man, and I support the study. However, I reject the myth that Kennewick Man is a European who was brutally murdered as part of a systemic genocide by American Indians. I reject the myth that Kennewick Man was a "European White Guy", when he is, in fact, a prehistoric man of undetermined culture. I reject pretty much anything those Asatru White Supremacist folks have to say (but which many FReepers quote as gospel, without realizing it) about the remains.

I'd love to know more about the prehistoric cultures of America, and Kennewick Man provides that opportunity. However, I will fight the studies if Kennewick Man is going to be used strictly for the purpose of "proving that European Whites were here first"... I will fight the study if ANY political agenda is at play.


51 posted on 10/01/2004 11:13:42 PM PDT by Chad Fairbanks (How do you ask a hamster to be the last hamster to die for a mistake?)
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